The trickle-down effect of losing 1 competitive team is having 1 non-competitive team. Buddy here just offered to cut the field by half, because reasons. If it was up to him, the country that just produced top-2 NHL picks wouldn't be here.
Of what? The thread is about changing the structure of the tournament due to Russia not being there and due to how uncompetitive the games have been. I stated that the timing sucks because the games today have been competitive, due to the solid performance of teams that the OP would have kicked out. Your post doesn't really deal with that, or with what I said in the post that you quoted.
my post was about the competitiveness of the tournament, i.e. just because Latvia can hang around a bit before the inevitable loss doesn't suggest 'competitive' to me. Not sure what you're not understanding.
The point was that no competition should be only open for just the teams that have been realistically able to win it. It is stupid and elitistic thinking to have only a handful of teams in any competition. The competition should be large enough and there should be a point also in inspiring those a bit weaker countries to get better, that haven’t been so far able to compete realistically in winning the competition. Only by competing with the best they can get a realistic view of where they are skillswise and what things might help them get more competitive.
That’s fine, they will still get blown out by others
As others mentioned before, who did Latvia get "blown out" by? Was actually Canada's closest game of the group stage.
I'd say that Latvia's performance has in fact established a reasonable level of competitiveness. Latvia won a game and was close in a quarterfinal game. The timing of this thread is bad and can't really be hand waved away.
elitist is not the right word, every tournament is going to have some sort of qualification/exclusive criteria. OP is just suggesting narrowing it. The world cup has 32 teams and wants to expand which most fans hate. The world juniors has 10 teams, they could expand if they wanted to to be less "elitist" as you call it, but they haven't. So are they elitist as is?
reasonable minds can disagree, some would say the same four (or five) teams making the semifinals every year is not "competitive" just because Latvia is capable of only losing by a goal after getting outshot 27-13 sometimes
And I was never particularly invested in watching Russia at all, unless they were playing against Finland. And I am always interested to watch Finland play any team anyway. Doesn’t matter if its’s Russia, Sweden or Austria. There are different aspects to be interested about the teams. I would in fact be as interested in watching Russia play against Sweden as I would be in watching Switzerland play against Germany.
That doesn’t apply like that, as hockey is played in so much fewer countries than soccer. To be respectable and non elitistic, is to have at least about the amount of teams that there are now. At least definitely not any fewer. I would rather have more of teams than less of them if I had to choose either way. Staying at the amount of teams that there is now is still a good option as well.
Yup. If we ever needed proof the OP was a bad idea, the quarterfinals proved it.
And that shows some people forget that the players playing on these teams are humans and not video game characters
Although some posters here definitely remind me of some looney toons cartoon characters or some cheap comedy movie characters.
